A lot of the current folks offering to sell .us's in bulk have them registered with expensive resellers.
While .us's are anywhere from $4-$5 at GoDaddy, they are almost twice that at most resellers (WWD). BUT you can't push to a GoDaddy account from WWD, and you can't transfer to GoDaddy at this point either.
Also, the market isn't huge for them at the moment, but they are all gone, you're right. Market has nowhere to go but "up", however, IMHO.
-Allan